Interactions in adventure games has gone from written input (aka “text adventures”) to todays mouse controlled (and often single-button-driven) games. There still exist text adventures though, although now called “Interactive Fiction”, and here the complexity of interaction has increased instead of becoming simpler. It seems like the way of interacting has on one end gotten more and more complex over the years, while on the other end it has gotten more and more simplified. What I want to explore in this post is if this great polarization has made us miss out on other ways to interact in adventure games and in what other ways interaction might be possible.
On Versioning (or how the simplest thing can save you from the hardest pain)
Long titles aside, this is no flashy post. Some will even find it a bit boring, but if at least one can learn anything from it, I will be happy. The motivation for it comes from an often overlooked issue.
The art of Timelapse
To speed up the development of our next horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent we have started to timelapse ourselves. This way it only takes 5 minutes to do the same amount of work as you would normally need 30 minutes to accomplish!
Level Editor Video – The Inside Scoop
Continuing the topic of my last post, here comes a post about the creation of our latest video…
Horror Tip: Beacon
The core of the game is simple: You are trapped in a cave and need to escape. To do so one must go through gloomy caves avoiding darkness at all cost. Helping the player accomplish this are crystals that spread light and a mysterious beacon that moves around, illuminating the surroundings where it goes. The game starts out slow and then progressively get more challenging.
Video Editing Hell – Linux to the Rescue!
I’m the proud owner of the oldest and crappiest computers here at Frictional Games. This is very unfortunate, to say the least, considering I’m the one usually recording videos of our work, editing and then publishing it.